What We Do to Survive

Eventually Williams and her student seemed to work out whatever they were having issues with. I had spent the fifteen or so minutes it had taken running my instrument through its paces, familiarizing myself with its myriad capabilities. I hadn’t taken my potions yet, they didn’t have a very long lasting effect so I was waiting for us to start before I did, but it was good practice nonetheless.

The device had drawn a couple of speculative looks and questions from my classmates. I’d mostly waved them off and no one had pressed the issue, so I ignored it for now. I was sure one or two of them would eventually ask about it in more depth, it was a pretty impressive looking contraption after all.

Professor Williams turned away from her student and walked over to where our group was clustered along the wall. However, I was much more interested in what the ritualist was up to.

A flick of her wrist summoned a large, steel banded chest that gleamed with suppressive enchantments under my enhanced vision. She cautiously unlocked it, the enchantments on the lock tasting her magic and coming undone with a touch.

She stepped back quickly as the chest sprang open, hand raised in preparation to cast something, but nothing seemed to happen. She stood at the ready for several long moments, then lowered her hand and cast what I recognized as a modified levitation spell.

I raised an eyebrow when I saw the adolescent troll float smoothly from the dark interior, its ugly face slack and jaw hanging open. I’d had an unfortunate run in with a troll once, one that I’d been lucky to escape unscathed, and at the time hadn’t been in any position to appreciate its magical nature.

Now, prepared as I was to watch an intricate magical ritual, I could see the bands of tightly woven magic that flowed through its muscles and bones. Trolls possessed an impressive level of strength, regeneration, and magic resistance. There was a good reason they were a favorite guard and war animal, they were physically powerful but easily susceptible to brute force mental magic.

None of that mattered at the moment of course, though I was impressed by the skill it took to so smoothly levitate a magically resistant target. She opened a hatch on the bottom of the spherical ritual chamber and carefully moved the troll inside.

Once it was arranged to her liking, she withdrew four heavily enchanted metal spikes from within her cloak and proceeded to roughly crucify the unconscious animal. The spikes clearly had some sort of embedded levitation enchantment, as I could see the moment she released her own spell.

The drooling creature slumped slightly, but the pegs driven through its palms, ankles, and belly kept it mostly upright in the air. It wasn’t bleeding, I noted with interest, rapidly scrawling notes about the procedure. Probably a further function of the pegs, though maybe it was caused by potions the creature had consumed beforehand? I hoped I would have the opportunity to ask later.

My attention was drawn away from the preparations as Professor Williams gave us some final instructions. We were to stay no more than five feet away from the wall. No active magic use of any kind was permitted. We were to stay absolutely silent.

They were all things we already knew, but she was just being careful. My first semester with her had driven home the point that you could never be too careful, especially with ritual magic.

She fell silent and donned some enchanted spectacles that glittered brightly despite the dim light in the ritual chamber. I took another note to ask her about those later, I’d never seen her wear glasses before and I could see they were heavily enchanted, then returned to observing the final preparations.

From what I could gather from the runes and other preparations, this was going to be some sort of ‘theft’ type ritual. The girl was going to ritually murder the troll in order to take on some of its characteristics, probably the afore mentioned physical might.

Ritual magic was one of the best, if not the safest, methods of self modification out there. We’d touched on it briefly in Professor Yana’s class but most of what I knew about it came from this class and my own research. While shapeshifting magic and internal mana circulation could do a lot, ritual magic was a massive shortcut.

You didn’t have to know exactly how a troll’s strength worked, nor have the capability to manipulate your mana in the precise way that its body naturally did in order to copy it. The power of the sacrifice was instead channeled to sidestep the entire issue, making massive alteration possible with much less effort.

Though I certainly wasn't going to say it around Professor Williams, I felt that enhancement rituals were a crutch and a shortcut. I was almost certain that anything you could accomplish with ritual magic was similarly doable through precise mana control and study.

Would that stop me from making use of them? Absolutely not, and in fact I was very excited to take the plunge. However I still planned to eventually master those same abilities manually. Ritual magic had its own limits and I felt that was the most likely way to break past those barriers.

The ritual began in earnest not long after and I quickly threw back my potions and set in to observe. The ritualist, Erna I’d overheard one of the others say, sealed herself inside the crystal sphere with the troll and began to go through motions she had clearly practiced extensively.

Chanting all the while, she carved runes into the troll’s skin with a bloody athame one handed, her other used for arcane hand gestures. The troll woke up a few minutes into the process, but was held firmly in place by the pegs it was impaled on.

I took thorough notes, marking down her exact actions and my observations on the mana flows caused by them. She was building a sort of pseudo spell matrix, one too large and complex to hold in her mind all at once. The runes played a part, but the key I thought was in how she directed the mana released by her words and gestures.

The ritual peaked after roughly half an hour of constant work. I knew from prior research that it was just as the sun fully set in the outer world, though the space inside Avalon’s hidden realm would remain brightly lit for a few hours longer.

The enormous ritual matrix snapped into focus, massive amounts of mana rippling through the intricate construct constrained inside the crystal sphere. An almost palatable wave of mana rolled off it, flowing and rippling through the room like a pond on a windy day.

Then it all collapsed inward. With a visible flash of light, the girl slumped forward onto the rounded crystal beneath her. The troll’s body seemed so shrivel in on itself, skin collapsing as the muscle beneath it was converted into pure magic. The bloody runes that had covered the entire arrangement vanished in an instant, burned away by the spell’s wake.

I worried for a moment that the ritual had ended in failure, killing the girl in the process. That would mean that I had wasted a lot of resources without seeing exactly what had gone wrong in the attempt.

My fears were quickly proven unfounded when Erna stood up on shaky feet, a broad smile on her face. She took a moment to steady herself, then carefully slid open the crystal sphere and dropped the short distance down to the ground.

Professor Williams was there to meet her, whispering something into her ears as she wrapped the cloak back around her shoulders. A potion vial was placed against her lips and she drank the entire thing back in one long sip. Almost immediately, the girl straightened slightly, some of the weakness gone from her posture.

Turning away for a moment, Professor Williams called out, “I hope everyone got a lot out of this today, we will be discussing it in class on Thursday. I will be escorting Erna here back to her room, but if you have any urgent questions, I will be available in my office later tonight.”

She gave us all a sharp nod, then swept from the room, half carrying the exhausted Erna. I made a mental note to look into that. I wasn’t sure if the weakness was a sign of poor preparation or simply a side effect of the ritual, but I would have to make a plan to get back to my room safely.

From the look of it, Williams was pretty protective of her students so that was certainly an option. The entire ritual complex was considered a safe zone, but it was a long trek from here to the student accommodations. I wouldn’t worry about it too much, not yet at least, but it was something to consider. It wouldn’t do to get careless. As my father had always said, ‘An unprepared hunter is a dead hunter’.

I swallowed heavily, my mother’s voice echoing softly in my head. ‘A hungry hunter my love, the children are awake’. I clenched my teeth and began to circulate my mana faster. A wave of calm flowed through me, driving away such dark thoughts. This wasn’t the time.

Instead, I gathered up my things and joined a trio of my classmates who were gathered together beside the crystal sphere.

“Oh, hey Orion! Com’ on over, we’re just comparin’ notes” called out one of them as he saw me approach, “Wha’d ya think?”

“It was certainly something. I’ve never seen any magic like that, very impressive.”

“Yeah,” chimed in the other male in the group, “Just reading about it really doesn’t do it justice.”

“You can say that again,” added the only girl of the group, “and we’re supposed to pull something like that off before the end of the semester!” She bit her lip, fidgeting nervously as she flipped through a palm sized notebook.

I sat down beside them, laying my own notes on the ground between us. Unlike in many of my other classes, the students in Advanced Enhancement Rituals were moderately friendly and open to collaboration. This was our second semester together and no one had died during the first one, so that had built some amount of trust. It helped that we weren’t really doing anything practical and dangerous, so there was little risk of someone ‘accidently’ getting one of us killed.

I had expected the relationships we’d formed to mostly collapse as we moved onto the risky business of actual ritual magic, but that hadn’t really happened. Sure people weren’t nearly as open with their own work, letting someone know the specifics of how you designed and executed rituals was risky business, but we still often collaborated on assignments and compared lecture notes.

It was kind of nice, actually. Reminded me a lot of the school I’d attended when I was very young, before my family had been forced to move out of the big city. Sure I stayed on my guard around them, but we occasionally met to work together in the library or our normal classroom if it was available.

Of the class, these three were the ones I’d gotten to know best. Ulan and Alan were identical twin brothers that shared a third soul. It was a rare condition, thought to be caused when a triplet was absorbed during pregnancy, and granted the two some interesting abilities.

On the other hand, Camille was an ordinary human, much like I was. She was a moderately talented spellcaster, but I really worried about her sometimes. She came from Gulivine, just like Janna actually, but had not benefited from the same sort of social education that the heiress had. The girl had some very strange ideas about justice and fairness that I couldn’t believe hadn’t been beaten out of her yet.

She would someday make a very valuable tool, if she survived that long. I didn’t think she had it in her to complete her education, but maybe she would surprise me. For now however, I knew she had a good eye for runes and wanted to pick her brains about what she’d noticed.

“So, Camille, I know you said you would be using a rune compass for your observations. What did you think of the symbols on the sphere? I could see they were constricting the mana flows, but I didn’t really recognize the design.”

The girl perked up slightly, her doubts forgotten for the moment. She fanned through the notebook in her hands, then set it down and used a minor illusion to display an enlarged version of what she’d written.

“Oh it was some fascinating stuff! I would have never thought to use elven pictograms for this sort of working, I don’t think we’ve talked about it in class at all.” She pointed to one of the symbols she was projecting. “See, she made a couple modifications to the structure, but it's clearly elven in origin. I’m not sure about the exact meaning, I’ll have to check my books and get back to you guys, but it's a sort of rebound anchor.”

I leaned forward, studying the bit she was pointing to intently. I could see her point about the symbol’s purpose, but I didn’t quite understand why she thought it was elven of all things.

Ulan however seemed to understand immediately. “Oh, ye’ I think I remember this.” He sketched a somewhat similar symbol beside the indicated rune. “Pretty sure it's this. Ala, containment and strength within the home.”

I nodded along slowly as the two fell into a discussion about the modifications done to the runework. That was slightly outside anything I’d studied. I’d only briefly focused on rune work, finding the discipline somewhat irritating.

I’d focused primarily on classical dwarven runes, since those seemed to be the most stable and consistent from everything I’d read. It was dwarven runes I’d used to strengthen my pet’s bindings, dwarven runes carved into her back to suppress the girl, and dwarven runes I planned to use in my own rituals.

Still, hearing them discuss what Erna had done could still offer me insight into my own work, so I listened quietly and took notes when appropriate. As the two got more and more technical, I shared an amused look with Alan, who looked just as confused as I felt.

I knew the bond they shared allowed them to share knowledge, but clearly that link only went so far. Oh what I wouldn’t do for an ability like that. Preferably something like a second body that could study while I worked, then could easily share that new information mind to mind. Unfortunately, if such a spell did exist, whoever had created it wasn’t sharing. Pity.